weird language oddities and etymology facts that sound fake but are real

Here are some weird language and etymology facts that sound made up, but are real:

• “Clue” started as “clew,” meaning a ball of thread. It linked back to the thread Theseus used to find his way out of the labyrinth in Greek mythology.^[4][6]
• “Salary” comes from the Latin salarium, tied to salt. Roman soldiers were sometimes given money to buy salt, which helped give us the modern word for pay.^[4]
• “Quarantine” comes from the Italian word for forty. Venice required ships to wait 40 days during the Black Death, and the term grew from that practice.^[4]
• “Robot” comes from Czech robota, meaning forced labor. The word was introduced in Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R.^[6][7]
• “Nimrod” originally meant a great hunter. The insult meaning came later, helped along by Bugs Bunny calling Elmer Fudd a “nimrod.”^[2][6]
• “Shampoo” comes from Hindi and originally meant “to massage.” It was later extended to mean washing hair.^[7]
• “Nightmare” includes an actual goblin in the old meaning of “mare.” The word referred to a demon or goblin sitting on a sleeping person’s chest.^[7]
• “Avocado” comes from an Aztec word meaning “testicle.” That’s one of the most unreasonably accurate word origins ever.^[6][9]
• “Whiskey” literally means “water of life.” It comes through Gaelic roots and a long chain of language changes.^[6][8]
• “Tattoo” comes from Polynesian tatau, meaning a mark on the skin. English picked it up through contact and travel.^[7][29]
• “Orange” used to be “norange.” The initial n got dropped because people heard phrases like “a norange” and later “an orange.”^[11]
• “Hooligan” may come from an Irish surname, or from a misheard Gaelic word for midge. Either way, it began life as a much stranger story than the insult most people use today.^[7]
• “Factoid” originally meant a fact that appears in print but has no solid evidence behind it. That one is almost too ironic to be real.^[8]
• Some languages turn whole ideas into one word. Archi has a verb system that can generate about 1,502,839 forms from a single root.^[20]
• Some languages don’t even mark yes/no questions differently from statements. Chalcatongo Mixtec does not signal questions with intonation, particles, or word order changes.^[18][26]
• Pormpuraaw speakers use compass directions instead of left and right. Their sense of time can shift depending on which way they are facing.^[21]
• Silbo Gomero is a whistled form of Spanish. It was built for long-distance communication across the valleys of La Gomera.^[21][22][29]
• Pirahã has no words for numbers or colors in the usual way English does. It is also described as having only a small inventory of sounds and a very different approach to time and reference.^[21][22][26]

If you want, I can turn these into:
1. 10 punchy short-form hooks,
2. a carousel with slides 1-8, or
3. a “wait, that’s real?” script list for TikTok/Reels.